1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an improved data processing system and in particular to a method and apparatus for processing data. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method, apparatus, and computer instructions for providing access to applications.
2. Description of Related Art
In today's personal home computing environments, users purchase and maintain various application software to perform various tasks. These tasks include creating documents, such as letters or notes using word processing programs. Additionally, users may maintain budgets and personal finance projections with financial programs. E-mail programs are employed to send and receive messages. Much time and money is wasted on upgrading this application software. Some products are installed and distributed with “bugs” or security holes. Installation of these applications typically requires a re-installation effort to deploy fixes, patches, and/or upgrades.
Additionally, many software packages purchased by users contain applications that are never used by those users. For example, the user may purchase an application package that is bundled with a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, an e-mail program, and a database access program. In many instances, the user will never use the database access program. As a result, the user has wasted money and disk space by installing the package. Additionally, depending on the location and market, some home users may require applications to complete certain tasks but find that those applications are not readily available. For example, vendors may not offer a particular application or version of an application in certain countries. Further, some business users require applications that are available at work, but not at home in order to perform some tasks from home.
Additional time and money are wasted because many software vendors generate upgrades for software packages on a yearly basis. Users are forced to purchase these upgrades in order to use the new features in these more recent versions. In order to share these new documents or files, other users are forced to upgrade their software packages in order to use these new documents or files because these documents or files were created with a newer version of a software package and may not be compatible with those of an older version.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method, apparatus, and computer instructions for allowing a user to access applications without requiring maintenance of those applications.